Causes

There is no actual known cause of Alzheimer's Disease. However scientists have been looking up two unproven causes. One of these causes is metal poisoning. In Alzheimer victims, a high level of aluminum traces have been discovered in the brain tissues. Because many people deal with and use aluminum everyday, this hypothesis can be possible. However, it has not been proven correct yet. The next possible cause of Alzheimer's is poor nutrition during one's childhood. In 1998, Robert Abbot, a professor at The University of Virginia Medcal School, discovered that over 3700 men, ages from 71 to 91, whose growth was stunted due to poor nutrition as a child, would have a much higher chance of developing some sort of dimentia, especially Alzheimer's Disease. Besides these two possible causes, scientists do know that for some reason, parts of the brain cell's factories stop functioning as well as they should be. As a result, it begins to malfunction and damage spreads. Cells lose their ability to work and slowly die off. Although the causes for this damage is unknown, scientists have listed two prime suspects. These two suspects are strange structures and are called plaques and tangles. Plaques build up between nerve cells and contain protein fragments called beta-amyloid which disrupt cognitive functions and kill neurons. Tangles are twisted fibers filled with another type of protein known as tau. This abnormal protein disrupts normal important brain functions. Also, tangles tend to form in dying cells and so, a brain diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease, will have an unusually large amount of tau in their brain. Both plaques and tau form in areas important to the brain such as language, learning, and memory thus destroying major parts of the brain.